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Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities in perception, yet holistic Affective Image Content Analysis (AICA)—which integrates perception, reasoning, and generation into a unified framework—remains underexplored. To address this, we introduce AICA-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark comprising three core tasks: Emotion Understanding (EU), Reasoning (ER), and Generation (EGCG). We evaluate 23 VLMs, revealing critical gaps: models struggle with intensity calibration and suffer from descriptive shallowness in open-ended tasks. To bridge these gaps, we propose Grounded Affective Tree (GAT) Prompting, a training-free framework that integrates visual scaffolding with hierarchical reasoning. Experiments show that GAT effectively corrects intensity errors and significantly enhances descriptive depth, establishing a robust baseline for future affective multimodal research.

ACL 2026

 AICA-Bench: Holistically Examining the Capabilities of VLMs in Affective Image Content Analysis

It is my great pleasure and honor to welcome you to the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026), held in San Diego, California, USA, July 2–7, 2026. ACL 2026 continues our fields tradition of excellence in scholarship, innovation, and inclusivity, and I am deeply grateful to the many volunteers who have worked tirelessly to bring this event to life.

It is exciting to see the many developments in the field reflected at our conference, such as the advancement of large language models (born out of our community) into many application directions. This is not without challenges, partly due to unsolved problems, and partly due to misuse of the technology. All this is reflected well at ACL 2026. The conference also reflects that the field is not only about advancing technology, but also the science of fundamentally understanding language and how it is use by many different speaker communities. <br>
[Full Message from General Chair Philipp Koehn](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1QiJFOmMjvDgsDo3i1XzlQnImxe3RU_Cy/view?usp=sharing) <br><br><br>
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The 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026) will take place in San Diego, California, from July 2 - 7, 2026.

poster

Current Information Seeking (InfoSeeking) agents struggle to maintain focus and coherence during long-horizon exploration, as tracking search states, including planning procedure and massive search results, within one plain-text context is inherently fragile.
To address this, we introduce \textbf{Table-as-Search (TaS)}, a structured planning framework that reformulates the InfoSeeking task as a Table Completion task.
TaS maps each query into a structured table schema maintained in an external database, where rows represent search candidates and columns denote constraints or required information.
This table precisely manages the search states: filled cells strictly record the history and search results, while empty cells serve as an explicit search plan.
Crucially, TaS unifies three distinct InfoSeeking tasks: Deep Search, Wide Search, and the challenging DeepWide Search.
Extensive experiments demonstrate that TaS significantly outperforms numerous state-of-the-art baselines across three kinds of benchmarks, including multi-agent framework and commercial systems.
Furthermore, our analysis validates the TaS's superior robustness in long-horizon InfoSeeking, alongside its efficiency, scalability and flexibility.
Code and datasets are publicly released at \url{https://github.com/AIDC-AI/Marco-Search-Agent}.

Table-as-Search: Agentic Information Seeking is Table Completion

Evaluating personality-related tendencies in Large Language Models (LLMs) helps characterize model behavior, compare models beyond task accuracy, and support responsible deployment in socially interactive settings. However, existing questionnaire-based evaluation methods exhibit limited stability and offer little explainability, as their results are highly sensitive to minor variations in prompt phrasing or role-play configurations. To address these limitations, we propose an internal-activation–based approach, termed Persona-Vector Neutrality Interpolation (PVNI), for stable and explainable personality trait evaluation in LLMs. PVNI extracts a persona vector associated with a target personality trait from the model's internal activations using contrastive prompts. It then estimates the corresponding neutral score by interpolating along the persona vector as an anchor axis, enabling an interpretable comparison between the neutral prompt representation and the persona direction. We provide a theoretical analysis of the effectiveness and generalization properties of PVNI. Extensive experiments across diverse LLMs demonstrate that PVNI yields substantially more stable personality trait evaluations than existing methods, even under questionnaire and role-play variants.

Stable and Explainable Personality Trait Evaluation in Large Language Models with Internal Activations

Automated environment configuration is a critical bottleneck in scaling software engineering (SWE) automation. To provide a reliable evaluation standard for this task, we present Multi-Docker-Eval benchmark. It includes 40 real-world repositories spanning 9 programming languages and measures both success in achieving executable states and efficiency under realistic constraints. Our extensive evaluation of state-of-the-art LLMs and agent frameworks reveals key insights: (1) the overall success rate of current models is low (F2P at most 37.7%), with environment construction being the primary bottleneck; (2) model size and reasoning length are not decisive factors, and open-source models like DeepSeek-V3.1 and Kimi-K2 are competitive in both efficiency and effectiveness; (3) agent framework and programming language also have significantly influence on success rate. These findings provide actionable guidelines for building scalable, fully automated SWE pipelines.

 Multi-Docker-Eval: A `Shovel of the Gold Rush' Benchmark on Automatic Environment Building for Software Engineering

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly being explored for clinical question answering and decision support, yet safe deployment critically requires reliable handling of patient measurements in heterogeneous clinical notes. Existing evaluations of LLMs for clinical numerical reasoning provide limited operation-level coverage, restricted primarily to arithmetic computation, and rarely assess the robustness of numerical understanding across clinical note formats. We introduce ClinicNumRobBench, a benchmark of 1,624 context-question instances with ground-truth answers that evaluates four main types of clinical numeracy: value retrieval, arithmetic computation, relational comparison, and aggregation. To stress-test robustness, ClinicNumRobBench presents longitudinal MIMIC-IV vital-sign records in three semantically equivalent representations, including a real-world note-style variant derived from the Open Patients dataset, and instantiates queries using 42 question templates. Experiments on 17 LLMs show that value retrieval is generally strong, with most models exceeding 85% accuracy, while relational comparison and aggregation remain challenging, with some models scoring below 15%. Fine-tuning on medical data can reduce numeracy relative to base models by over 30%, and performance drops under note-style variation indicate LLM sensitivity to format. ClinicNumRobBench offers a rigorous testbed for clinically reliable numerical reasoning. Code and data URL are available on https://github.com/MinhVuong2000/ClinicNumRobBench.

 How Robust Are Large Language Models for Clinical Numeracy? An Empirical Study on Numerical Reasoning Abilities in Clinical Contexts

Medical Vision-Language Models (Med-VLMs) have achieved expert-level proficiency in interpreting diagnostic imaging. However, current models are predominantly trained on professional literature, limiting their ability to communicate findings in the lay register required for patient-centered care. While text-centric research has actively developed resources for simplifying medical jargon, there is a critical absence of large-scale multimodal benchmarks designed to facilitate lay-accessible medical image understanding. To bridge this resource gap, we introduce MedLayBench-V, the first large-scale multimodal benchmark dedicated to expert-lay semantic alignment. Unlike naive simplification approaches that risk hallucination, our dataset is constructed via a Structured Concept-Grounded Refinement (SCGR) pipeline. This method enforces strict semantic equivalence by integrating Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) Concept Unique Identifiers (CUIs) with micro-level entity constraints. MedLayBench-V provides a verified foundation for training and evaluating next-generation Med-VLMs capable of bridging the communication divide between clinical experts and patients.

 MedLayBench-V: A Large-Scale Benchmark for Expert-Lay Semantic Alignment in Medical Vision Language Models

Reinforcement fine-tuning improves the reasoning ability of large language models, but it can also encourage them to answer unanswerable queries by guessing or hallucinating missing information. Existing abstention methods either train models to produce generic refusals or encourage follow-up clarifications without verifying whether those clarifications identify the key missing information. We study queries that are clear in meaning but cannot be reliably resolved from the given information, and argue that a reliable model should not only abstain, but also explain what is missing. We propose a clarification-aware RLVR reward that, while rewarding correct answers on answerable queries, jointly optimizes explicit abstention and semantically aligned post-refusal clarification on unanswerable queries. Using this reward, we train Abstain-R1, a 3B model that improves abstention and clarification on unanswerable queries while preserving strong performance on answerable ones. Experiments on Abstain-Test, Abstain-QA, and SelfAware show that Abstain-R1 substantially improves over its base model and achieves unanswerable-query behavior competitive with larger systems including DeepSeek-R1, suggesting that calibrated abstention and clarification can be learned through verifiable rewards rather than emerging from scale alone.

Abstain-R1: Calibrated Abstention and Post-Refusal Clarification via Verifiable RL

Large language models (LLMs) achieve strong performance on idiom identification benchmarks, yet their robustness to misleading contextual signals remains largely untested. We introduce ID10M-JAM, an adversarial extension of the ID10M dataset designed to jam model understanding by injecting coherent but conflicting context before each target sentence. For every sentence containing a potential idiomatic expression (PIE), we construct variants that deliberately invert contextual expectations: placing literal cues before idiomatic uses and idiomatic cues before literal ones. All variants are validated by human annotators to ensure naturalness and unambiguous interpretation for human readers. ID10M-JAM exposes systematic vulnerabilities in LLMs’ contextual reasoning, pushing idiom identification to its breaking point.

ID10M-JAM: Stress-Testing Idiom Identification Under Challenging Context

Understanding and controlling the behavior of large language models (LLMs) is an increasingly important topic in multilingual NLP. Beyond prompting or fine-tuning, $\textit{language steering}$, i.e.,~manipulating internal representations during inference, has emerged as a more efficient and interpretable technique for adapting models to a target language. Yet, no dedicated benchmarks or evaluation protocols exist to quantify the effectiveness of steering techniques. We introduce $\texttt{CLaS-Bench}$, a lightweight parallel-question benchmark for evaluating language-forcing behavior in LLMs across 32 languages, enabling systematic evaluation of multilingual steering methods. We evaluate a broad array of steering techniques, including residual-stream DiffMean interventions, probe-derived directions, language-specific neurons, PCA/LDA vectors, Sparse Autoencoders, and prompting baselines. Steering performance is measured along two axes: language control and semantic relevance, combined into a single harmonic-mean steering score. We find that across languages simple residual-based DiffMean method consistently outperforms all other methods. Moreover, a layer-wise analysis reveals that language-specific structure emerges predominantly in later layers and steering directions cluster based on language family. $\texttt{CLaS-Bench}$ is the first standardized benchmark for multilingual steering, enabling both rigorous scientific analysis of language representations and practical evaluation of steering as a low-cost adaptation alternative.

CLaS-Bench: A Cross-Lingual Alignment and Steering Benchmark

We introduce the Similarity-Distance-Magnitude (SDM) activation function, a more robust and interpretable formulation of the standard softmax activation function, adding Similarity (i.e., correctly predicted depth-matches into training) awareness and Distance-to-training-distribution awareness to the existing output Magnitude (i.e., decision-boundary) awareness, and enabling interpretability-by-exemplar via dense matching. We further introduce the SDM estimator, based on a data-driven partitioning of the class-wise empirical CDFs via the SDM activation, to control the class- and prediction-conditional accuracy among selective classifications. When used as the final-layer activation over pre-trained language models for selective classification, the SDM estimator is more robust to covariate shifts and out-of-distribution inputs than existing calibration methods using softmax activations, while remaining informative over in-distribution data.

Similarity-Distance-Magnitude Activations

Knowledge Tracing (KT) aims to predict learners' future performance from past interactions. While recent KT approaches have improved via learning item representations aligned with Knowledge Components, they overlook the procedural dynamics of problem solving. We propose Behavior-Aware Item Modeling (BAIM), a framework that enriches item representations by integrating dynamic procedural solution information. BAIM leverages a reasoning language model to decompose each item's solution into four problem-solving stages (i.e., understand, plan, carry out, and look back), pedagogically grounded in Polya’s framework. Specifically, it derives stage-level representations from per-stage embedding trajectories, capturing latent signals beyond surface features. To reflect learner heterogeneity, BAIM adaptively routes these stage-wise representations, introducing a context-conditioned mechanism within a KT backbone, allowing different procedural stages to be emphasized for different learners. Experiments on XES3G5M and NIPS34 show that BAIM consistently outperforms strong pretraining-based baselines, achieving particularly large gains under repeated learner interactions.

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